Seventeen-year-old Snow lives within the walls of the Whittaker Institute, a high security mental hospital in upstate New York. Deep down, she knows she doesn't belong there, but she has no memory of life outside, except for the strangest dreams. And then a mysterious, handsome man, an orderly in the hospital, opens a door – and Snow knows that she has to leave …

She finds herself in icy Algid, her true home, with witches, thieves, and a strangely alluring boy named Kai. As secret after secret is revealed, Snow discovers that she is on the run from a royal lineage she's destined to inherit, a father more powerful and ruthless than she could have imagined, and choices of the heart that could change everything. Heroine or villain, queen or broken girl, frozen heart or true love, Snow must choose her fate …

A wonderfully icy fantastical romance, with a strong heroine choosing her own destiny, Danielle Paige's irresistibly page-turning Snow Queen is like Maleficent and Frozen all grown up.

Danielle Page’s Stealing Snow is a dark, romantic retelling of The Snow Queen. Sounds amazing, right? Sadly, the story doesn’t live up to the premise.

Snow has lived most of her 17 years in a mental institution in upstate New York. Her mother visits her from time to time, but since an incident about a year ago with her fellow inpatient and beau Bale, she has been isolated. But when Bale is kidnapped and a mysterious boy appears in her dreams telling her to escape and find him beyond the Tree, Snow leaves everything she knows for a journey into Algid, another world where she is an ice-wielding princess fated to take over her father’s kingdom.

Stealing Snow is a loose retelling of The Snow Queen , a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen in the nineteenth century. I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about The Snow Queen. I thought that it formed the basis for the Disney film Frozen, although as it turns out, the final production of the film has almost nothing in common with the fairy tale. This story shares characters and story elements with the fairy tale, though – the shattered mirror, the River Witch, Gerde and Kai, the Robbers and their castle are all from the original in one form or another.

While the world of Algid itself may be imaginatively retold, it just didn’t come alive for me. The characters tend to teleport or “tornado” themselves from one location to another, so I didn’t really get a feel for the land, except that the Northern Lights are always shining over an eternal winter. It almost had the feeling of an Alice in Wonderland fever dream, where you’re suddenly in some other random location and you have no recollection how you got there. I was confused more than once, which is never a good thing.

Snow herself was determined and unafraid, willing to learn to control her magic in the short time she had available, but then she went and ruined everything by falling in love with every bloke she ran into. I mean, she was on a mission to save her one true love from the clutches of some unknown evil, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from falling for everyone else along the way to rescue him.

I may have given this book a harsh rating, but it really didn’t grab me as much as a story like this probably should have. That said, there’s a hell of a cliff hanger at the end – I’ll be interested to see where the story goes from here, if I can get over Snow swooning at every boy she meets.

I was sent a copy of Stealing Snow from Bloomsbury Australia in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!

2 Responses to “Review: Stealing Snow, Danielle Paige”

Artsyme

I tend to agree with Angelya. The book started out interesting, then along the way I couldn’t get a clear picture of anything or anyone. The writing started to fail with the tenses getting all mixed up and as a writer/editor myself that’s where I got lost and flipped through the pages to the end just so I could put the book to rest. Dissapointing.